Quentin looked over at the elegantly-dressed woman at the end of the panel. “Dame June? How do you respond?”
“Thank you, Quentin. Just quietly, I am confident we will have a breakthrough in the next two or three days. The public should be reassured the top people in neuroplasticity drug research have been drafted onto a controlling committee—of which I am chair—and they tell me they have made considerable progress.”
A voice shouted from the audience. “Yeah, and we know ‘oo will get the vaccines first don’ we. You and yer filfy-rich cronies—”
The program descended into uproar as Dame June attempted to counsel the shouting man; David Gaspin stood up and waved his finger at Alan Jensen and continued to spout his hypothesis about clandestine brain research, and Quentin Tabernacle eventually threw up his hands in despair and looked at the camera with his disarming smile. “I’m afraid that’s all we have time for this evening, I’d like to thank my guests, Dame—” but he was obscured by a rush of audience members storming the small studio stage.
The program’s exit music began and the credits rolled, leading with the show’s byline: ‘The Intelligentsia: Private Intelligence In The Public Eye’.
~ 20 ~
Socks
The morning sun was hardly out of bed when the first of the kids made their way into the café. Sarina was already there. A highly disturbed sleep had seen her awake well before dawn, so she showered and changed into some spare clothes she had forgotten she’d stored in ‘her room’ at the lab.
So surprisingly, she was feeling optimistic for a change. The raw fear from last night’s episode was well and truly gone. She was glad there had been no more blackouts or dizzy spells. Maybe it really had been a virus, or just part of growing up? Hormones even? She pouted as she remembered the conversation with her mother.
“Hi, Sarina.”
“Oh, hi, Jimmy. Did you sleep okay?” Silly question really. She could tell by the dark marks under the ten-year-old’s eyes and the tension on his face.
He shook his head. “Hardly at all actually. I had nightmares all night long, or at least it felt like all night. Are we the first up?”
Sarina nodded.
“Morning, you two!” The Professor’s cheery greeting as he rounded the corner into the café seemed out of place, but welcome.
Sarina managed a smile. “Morning, Professor Harrison. Did you manage to get any sleep?”
“Some. But it wasn’t quality sleep, if you know what I mean.”
She did know what he meant. Her disturbed sleep had also been populated with violent nightmares. Rats, snakes—anything she hated or was afraid of, it was there. A thought occurred to her.
“Jimmy?”
“Yes?”
“What things were in your nightmares?”
The Professor took a sudden interest in the conversation and looked at them both sharply. “You had nightmares too?”
Jimmy nodded. “The entire night.” He looked at Sarina. “It was like somebody took a jar of the nastiest monsters I hate and threw them into my brain.” He grimaced. “Horses, angels, unicorns—”
“You’re afraid of unicorns?” Sarina almost laughed, but stopped when the boy shot her a fierce glare.
The Professor leaned in. “Everyone has fears. Personal ones. Even me.” He sighed. “And I too had a sleep continuously troubled by nightmares.”
Sarina remembered something odd from her night. “There was something though. I had a really funny nightmare about Nathan. He was being tortured by Makthryg, but he couldn’t tell him anything.”
Jimmy and the Professor both looked alarmed.
“Sounds awful,” the Professor said. “Why couldn’t he tell him anything?”
“That’s the funny thing. You see he was really dumb—I mean he was acting like the dumbest human on the planet.”
The Professor nodded. “That would be horrible.” He screwed his face up. “Hang on. That doesn’t sound like a nightmare. Unless you are scared of a dumb Nathan.”
She laughed. “Hardly. It’s his super-brain that scares me. But you’re right.” Her face dropped. “That must be his nightmare.”
A group of melancholy kids arrived together, holding hands. Some had wet cheeks.
The Professor stood and frowned. “What happened?”
The young girl at the front burst into tears. “I had nightmares!”
“Me too!”
“And me! I saw my cat burned alive, it was horrible!”
The café was soon a cacophony of wailing.
Sarina, Jimmy and the Professor moved among the rest of the children and helped them soothe their fear. Once they knew even the only adult among them had a similar experience and had recovered, they calmed down.
“Where’s Lena?”
“Here!” Lena came running up to the Professor, who caught her in his arms.
“Are you okay, Lena?” he said, squeezing her tightly.
She nodded. “But, Daddy I had terrible—”
“Nightmares?” came the answer from everyone in unison. Lena stared at them all for a moment, then they broke into laughter. It was a welcome relief from the tension.
The Professor held up his hands for quiet. “Children, it’s been a very tough evening and night. I appreciate your bravery, but today I will have to organise for you to go home to your parents.”
A chorus of “No!” and “What about Nathan, and helping Sarina?” echoed around the café.
He nodded and assumed a serious expression. “You are incredibly brave. Unfortunately this is now a very adult situation, and I cannot expose you to more terrible visions like the one we all faced last night.” A few of the kids paled at the memory.
He continued. “So for now, take full advantage of the café. We’ve a couple of hours before the rest of the world wakes up, so we’ll make the most of it. Sarina and I will be in my office if you need us.” He motioned to Sarina to follow him.
The Professor closed the door on the way in and gestured for Sarina to sit. She looked at him and raised her eyes. “Mass nightmares, Professor? What’s going on?”
He sighed. “Let me explain. Five years ago when Malden and I discovered the rem-particle, we thought we were on the verge of a life-changing new science. Actually I still do, but it hasn’t quite—”
“It’s become dangerous, hasn’t it, Professor?”
“Yes it has. After Malden’s ... accident ... I resolved to find a way to make sure we could also reverse the effects of rem spikes—to build a neutraliser in effect. Of course, this was some time before I discovered the universe was losing rem-particles. Which, strangely, is what led me to postulate the existence of dark rem, held in balance with its twin.” He ran his hands through his hair.
“Nathan told me about the rem-particle loss making us lose our ability to be creative. He said the human race would become stupid. But he said it might happen much faster if the machine was used the wrong way. Is that true?”
He looked at her for a long time before answering.
“Nathan is right. To use his words, it does mean we are all ‘slowly becoming more stupid’, though I’d prefer to say we are losing our creative intelligence. Our evolutionary progress will stagnate, and eventually we will go backwards. At first I thought it would happen over a long period of time. In theory, I had time to fix it ...” He trailed off and looked away. Then swung back again to look at her. “And now a double-edged sword; accelerated rem-loss; and the unstable machine producing violent rem spikes; then the threat of the dark rem getting out of control”—he shrugged—“I fear for us all. One day I was running a session with a rem-scanner I had built, and that’s when I discovered people with an incredible ability to manipulate rem. Out of all the people I’ve come across so far, you are the most powerful by a long way. Nathan is not far behind, but he lacks your artistic genius. It’s that genius that gives you the creative manipulation, you see. But—”
“But what?”
“I still didn’t u
nderstand why we’d seen such a sudden jump in the rem-loss in the last few weeks. It’s as though there is an external force at work acting on the rem-particles. I had hoped that studying both you and Nathan would provide me with further insights, but ...” he put his chin into his hands and stared off into space.
Sarina felt the colour in her cheeks. “We were experiments?! How dare you?”
The Professor was startled out of his reverie and looked at her. “Oh no, Sarina, not like that.”
“Like what then? Didn’t we deserve to know about this ... rem problem?”
He nodded. “Yes, you did. I was actually working on it with Nathan and he was bursting at the seams to tell you all about it. I’m not sure why he didn’t at the time. I suppose recent events conspired to make that impossible, and now—”
“And now he’s a prisoner of a sorcerer in a strange world and we can’t get him back!”
He looked shocked. “Sarina, we don’t know we can’t get him back. Just because I failed with the Intensifiers before—”
His eyes lit up and he jerked up straight. “That’s it!”
“What?”
“The Intensifiers! We’ll use them again. But this time, we will know about the nightmarish apparitions—it’s another side-effect of the rem-loss—and you’ll be here to help direct us.”
Sarina faced the Professor and leaned in. “You’re telling me you will allow the kids to place those things on their head again? And this time they will know that what they will experience will be terrifying?”
“Yes.” He looked excited. “I must stop the agents arranging for them to be taken home. We need them. Excuse me, Sarina. I’ll be right back.”
She sat there nonplussed, as she watched him rush out of the office, his anxiety forgotten. She shook her head. “Sometimes I wonder who the real monster is,” she muttered, and sat back to wait. And think. So far she hadn’t been having any blackouts, and she wondered why she hadn’t felt any impact from the constant rem drain. She’d have to ask the Professor about that.
Five minutes later he reappeared, carrying one of the yellow hats.
“Are you going to join them, Professor?”
“What? Oh.” He looked at the Intensifier in his hand then back at Sarina. “No. This is for you.”
She must have flinched, because the Professor drew his brow together. “Sarina. If the kids are going to use these, and you’re going to help them, don’t you think you should know what they do?”
“Oh. Yes. Of course.” She felt silly. She’d thought the Professor was going to use her as the subject of another experiment. “What do you want me to do?”
“I need to test something. We know the Intensifiers will probably produce nightmarish images and scenarios, which we will have to do our best to ignore. Because of the rem-loss, it will be impossible to manipulate them creatively, but I have an idea about how to help us ignore them. Here”—he thrust the Intensifier at her—“try this on while I go fetch some things.” He gave her a funny look. “Don’t switch it on.”
What did he think she would do? Knowingly leave herself alone in his office with nightmares?
She put the hat on. It was a little tight, but not worth the effort of adjusting. She turned and looked at her reflection in the glass of the Professor’s office door. She looked like a child construction worker. And tired and drawn. For the second time that morning, she wondered about the dizzy spells, and shrugged it off. She’d committed herself to help. Nothing she could do about it right now, anyway.
“Here.” The Professor was back and holding something in his hand.
It was a small plate from the café. In separate spots around the plate were small amounts of various liquids. Thick red, yellow, brown ones, and a runny light-brown one. She looked blankly at him. “I don’t understand.”
“Smell. Our sense of smell. It’s extremely rare to smell anything in a dream, mainly because smell bypasses the neocortex and goes straight to the limbic system.”
“Whaa?”
“The neocortex is the part of the brain that controls and thinks. But the limbic system produces our emotional reactions. Have you ever smelled something and were instantly transported to where you were when you experienced that smell before? A house, a holiday, even a person wearing perfume?”
She nodded. She’d had exactly that happen to her only that morning. In her room at the lab, she found Rona’s pastels in her bag, and looking for some relief from the awful nightmares, she’d taken them out of the tin and looked at each one. The fresh, homemade chalkiness of them and the unique smell when she held one to her nose had taken her back to Rona’s shop, and wanting to keep that pleasant memory close, she slid the tin snugly into her pocket.
“Good. On this plate are some ah, items from the café. Tomato sauce, mustard, barbecue sauce and vinegar to be exact. I also have this.” He held up a small bottle of oil paint from her room. “The idea is that these smells will let you control and connect with what you know to be reality. You are not likely to encounter a nightmare with a smell in it, but with the Intensifier, the nightmare is going to feel very real.”
“Like the kids and the vipers?”
“Yes. So to train ourselves to ignore what might look and feel extremely real and frightening, we will use our sense of smell to ground us back in reality. Trust what you smell, Sarina, not what you see. If you can’t smell it, it’s not real.”
She nodded. “So how will I use them?”
“We need to show the kids that this will be their lifeline. It will stop them being scared, and if you show them how to do it, they will follow your lead, I know it. So, dip each finger into one of the liquids, and perhaps we should put the oil paint on your index finger, since it will be a strong personal reference for you.”
She dipped the fingers of her right hand into the liquids, saving her index finger for the oil paint, as the Professor had suggested. She held up her messy hand and inspected it. It looked and felt silly. She hoped it worked.
“Okay, I’m ready. What do we do?”
“I’m going to switch on the Intensifier and slowly increase the power. Any time you are overwhelmed by the imagery, sniff one of your fingers and you’ll remember this is only a nightmare. It’s not real.” He paused and looked her directly in the eye. “Now. I want you to think of Nathan. Let’s see if you can locate him; nothing else. No rescue attempts, okay?”
“Okay. I’ll just watch. If I can find him, that is.”
The Professor reached over and pushed a button on the side of the yellow hat.
“Nothing’s happening?”
“Wait for the power to increase.” He started to move a small slider on the front of the helmet she hadn’t noticed up until now. “Okay, now please concentrate on Nathan.”
She closed her eyes and thought of her friend. She remembered the time in the lab together, where he had taught her how to do maths the way he did it. She’d been able to pass a crucial test thanks to that. He was a tough teacher, even though he was only her age. Nathan didn’t suffer fools and to some, he appeared arrogant and cocky. She herself had been the butt of his jokes many times, until the events in Paolo’s world had thrown them together. She pictured him now: Tall and lanky, with a friendly face.
“I’m not getting anything, Professor.” She had her eyes still closed, and her right hand held up in the air. She could feel something dripping down her wrist. She wondered what she must look like, sitting there with the ridiculous yellow contraption on her head and holding up a hand dripping with sauce.
“Wait a moment. I’ll turn it up more.”
The forest branches flew past her and she knew instantly which world she was in. “I’m seeing Paolo’s world, Professor!”
The Professor didn’t reply, so she kept on flying through the forest trail. Why were there no apparitions?
With no warning, the trail darkened and she was pulled head down into a vertical pit, flying down it at great speed and directly into a gigantic, multi-j
awed rat’s mouth. She screamed and flailed her arms, but nothing would stop her descent. In seconds she would be rat-meat, shredded by hundreds of enormous razor sharp pointy teeth.
The pungent smell of vinegar overwhelmed her. Rats that smelled of ... Oh right. She inhaled the smell and trusted the massive maw she was flying into was merely an apparition.
She flew right through it, and was once again on the forest trail. “It worked, Professor.” No reply. She assumed he was making sure she had a supply of smells.
Come to think of it, the Professor was right. That gigantic mutated rat’s mouth had zero smell. With her eyes still closed, she brought a finger to her nose and smelled tomato sauce. She had to stop herself grinning at the memory of fish and chips at the beach with her mother. She thought of something she must tell the Professor. But now, concentrate on Nathan, she told herself. There’s a reason your connection with this world has brought you down this trail. She realised the trail was not in complete darkness, the way it had often been before in her dreams and travels in this world.
She lifted up into the air and saw she was travelling towards the fortress in the distance. She shivered at the memories. She dived back down into the forest trail, and stopped short.
In front of her and blocking her path was something she could only describe as a large sickly-brown and black-spotted jellyfish. Its tentacles were splayed out in front of it in a dome-like shape, with the extreme ones stuck to the forest trail on either side. She eased back from the awful thing, hoping it wouldn’t strike.
The thing was blobbing towards her, and the spare tentacles were reaching over, around and behind her. She felt one brush her neck, another her shoulder, then suddenly it was on her and she couldn’t breathe for the blubbery fatty substance on her mouth and nose.
F i n g e r. The image floated across her mind with difficulty. What did she have to do with her finger? She couldn’t breathe and struggled against the revolting substance pressing down into her mouth and her nostrils. Her nostrils.
The jellyfish had no smell.
The Dreamer Chronicles Trilogy Boxed Set Vol I - III: A Sci-Fi Parallel Universe Adventure (The Dreamer Chronicles - Science Fiction For Kids And Adults) Page 50